


ghost.

by oneinspats



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, Ghosts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 05:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7878202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by a conversation with bean over on tumblr. </p><p>There are ghosts of several different kinds and some are real and physical and you can touch them and others just scream at you in your sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When Aramis learns about phantoms as a child they are terrifying things that lurk in the wilds of the unmanageable interior of France. They are the drifting souls of the damned who are left, bereft of comfort, to finish their unfinished business. At seminary, the brief pause in an eventful life, they learn that ghosts speak Latin and come to us with a purpose. Think of the English play about the Danish family. The poison which leaked from ear to brain ending a life prematurely.

He does think about it.

Then, finding seminary not to his taste, he goes off and becomes a musketeer and doesn’t think about it anymore and ghosts for him become more solid and real and they linger in corridors and in the faces of his friends and one time he killed a ghost because the man had died long before he shot him and another time he held a ghost as he died because the man had died long before the battle did him in and another time he watched a ghost be born because he thought there was love when there wasn’t.

The Louvre is full of ghosts. They crowd in hallways and tumble over each other and prey on one another and the quick and the dead. Aramis is awake at night because he cannot sleep because there is howling of a ghost that had been love and when the queen weeps it makes Aramis cringe and he shifts, moves away, cannot bear her touch.

‘You never did think things through.’

A ghost has never spoken to him so he is startled and there, beside a window, in shadow, is a shade. Aramis smells incense. It reminds him of Mass.

‘Why are you here?’ He asks in rusty, dog-Latin because that it what you are supposed to do when you see a ghost and the doctor of theology at seminary would be so proud of him at this moment. That he remembered even one lesson. He hadn’t recalled the others.

‘Your ability to decline verbs is as thorough as your ability to think things through.’

‘You’re speaking _langue d’oil!_ ’

‘As I did in life, if you recall.’

‘I thought ghosts only spoke in Latin.’

The ghost of the long dead cardinal merely shrugs. Aramis thinks that he ought to be frightened. He’s more relieved than anything else. Because here is a man who knows the exhaustion of power and court life and no, he hadn’t thought things through, and he had pushed back against the half-baked plan to make him First Minister, and oh oh he is so tired of it all and Anne is probably still crying and their bed, such as it is, is so cold especially on these winter nights and the pain in the base of his chest has not gone away since – since he cannot remember.

‘I see you’re handling my sudden reappearance in your life rather well,’ Richelieu says. He does not move from the shadows. To Aramis his is folds of grey and midnight blues and purples. If there is red, it is fleeting. The grey eminence does not have the same ring. It is a mad thought. Aramis laughs.

‘I’m going mad.’

Richelieu is unimpressed. ‘I would say that you’ve already been there, done that regarding madness. No man in his right mind would sleep with the queen.’

‘Rochefort tried.’

Richelieu continues to be unimpressed. ‘You think Rochefort was in his right mind?’

‘No.’

‘If you’re comparing yourself to mad, dead, assaulters then you have sunk to lows that even I could not have imagined for you.’

‘You’ve always hated me.’ The hall is cold. Aramis thinks of a warm fire and wants to move somewhere else where he can curl up inwards upon himself but does not know if Richelieu can move from his spot and, in this moment of cathartic insanity of conversational ghosts, he does not want to see the cardinal disappear.

‘No. You misjudge me.’

‘Please explain Adele then.’

‘You slept with the mistress of the First Minister of France, known for his ruthless policies, and expected her to be safe? I maintain my initial line, you do not think things through. You do not consider how your actions will impact the lives of those around you. Your solipsism is astounding. Your narcissism, something I have long come to expect. Even your advocate on this side has conceded that point.’

Aramis wonders who his advocate is. Can one have an advocate in death? He always assumed that when you die it will be you alone with God and you will work through purgatory for your sins for as long as He deems fit. Which, Aramis reflects, might be a long while for me.

Richelieu’s head tilts to the side. Cat-like. Aramis has seen the palace cats hunting their prey and wearing similar expressions.

‘How is her majesty the queen?’

‘Fine.’ He shrugs. ‘We haven’t – that is, our relationship hasn’t –‘

‘Weathered well?’

He shrugs again. A helpless feeling. He is used to feeling helpless now. He wonders if he shouldn’t retire and let Mazarin take the position of First Minister. Richelieu’s protégé has all the cunning and ambition to do the job admirably and it would allow Aramis to escape because this palace is a prison and the only thing he had ever done when trapped is run.

‘Do you think it might have something to do with the fact that you hardly knew each other when you concocted this hair-brained scheme? One would hope, for the sake of France, you both would have been able to control your base, animal instincts but evidently even that most simple, most reasonable hope was too much for you.’

‘She was in a loveless marriage!’

‘She was born a princess. You do not marry for love and if she thought she was going to then she's more a fool than I thought. And, not to put too fine a point on it, what she has now is obviously brimming with care and affection.’

Now, the rage begins to bubble and boil and he feels unhinged. He has never really felt unhinged before. He wonders if this is how Marsac felt when he saw the Duke of Savoy. He wonders if this is how Porthos felt after he learned about his father. He wonders if this is how Athos felt when he saw his dead brother. The urge to punch the cardinal grows but then it is gone because he realizes that were he to try and slam a fist in the ugly face he’d hit nothing but the wall and then he’d have a bloody fist and he’d have to explain it to Anne and she wouldn’t look at him the same. Not that she does anyway.

‘My mother once said that a man who punches a wall in anger was a man who’d be willing to punch you, one day.’ Aramis says this and Richelieu nods.

‘Your mother sounds like a woman who has experienced unfortunate things in her life.’

‘My father was a good man.’

‘Many good men punch walls.’

‘And murder women in woods.’

‘I never claimed to be a good man.’ Richelieu smiles. It is not kind. ‘I was a necessary man. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, to be sure, but neither are they married concepts.’

‘How is it?’

‘You’ll have to be more explicit in your question.’

‘How is it being dead?’

Richelieu’s expression becomes cautious. Then he smiles again but it is different from the cruel one and it is perhaps bittersweet which is an emotion that Aramis is loath to associate with the cardinal.

‘I heard about you from your teachers at seminary. They said you had great promise should the right patron wish to encourage you.’ Richelieu speaks but it is not to Aramis. It is to the window and the stone around them. The Louvre is a sepulcher and Aramis wonders if he has died already. ‘But then you ran off and joined the musketeers and left all that good sense and learning, which was spoken so highly of, behind you. It is a wonder.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘No.’

The shade of Richelieu flickers, a fraction. Fades in then is back and present and looks as solid as if he were alive in front of Aramis now and then suddenly he is gone.

The hall is empty. It feels grey. Everything feels grey and tastes blue and his body aches like he’s been through a battle and he tells himself that he ought to go to bed but instead he goes to his office, the office that had once been Richelieu’s then Rochefort’s and is now his and maybe, one day, will be Mazarin’s, and has a fire lit and curls up with a blanket on the hard floor and dreams of Savoy and those dead bodies and how after some of the battles he had been in he hadn’t been able to walk for the dead bodies and one time a man, a good man, named Lavell, had died saving his life and had vomited blood onto Aramis’ face as they collided and fell to the ground. 

In short, he dreams of ghosts.


	2. Chapter 2

Morning is bright and there feels a perverseness to it. That it can be so bright when inside, a person can feel – whatever it is she feels.

Anne lingers in the nursery and the women drift out quietly. Softly. She misses Constance. She misses her companionship, her frank conversation, she wonders how Constance is doing. When she asks Aramis he says that she is well and sends her love but Anne isn’t sure she does because if she sent her love surely she would come and visit and Constance must know that she would always be welcome at court.

When D’Artagnan comes to court he says the same thing as Aramis. She is well, she sends her love.

Looking at her son she is seized with anxiety and she knew she would be because she always is when she sees him. She loves him, yes. But struggles, sometimes, to hold him. To pick him up and be a mother to him. She has never seen it done in a meaningful way and wonders if there is something wrong with her because she does not lavish attention on him the way she thinks she is supposed to.

Aramis watches her with Louis, sometimes. He will try and not be seen but she will know he is there. She will try and be a good mother then because that is what he wants her to be. She will pick up Louis then, awkwardly, and be certain she is holding him wrong, doubly certain when she witnesses a brief, fleeting side-eye look from the nursemaid. She will want to cry. 

She loves Louis. She hates him. She wishes he had never been born and then hates herself for wishing it.

There had been a summer of her marriage when Louis, the man, her husband, not this boy-king in his cradle, had been kind to her. Had been warm and friendly and no there had never been love of any kind from him but there had been something like friendship. She was born to the purple. She knew what to expect from her life.

Had thought she had known.

To the cradle and the baby in it she says, ‘I miss your father. The king.’ To clarify. Although the baby will never know otherwise. Her hand rests on her stomach. She thinks that she wants to name the second one Phillipe but there cannot be a second one for there is no king for the child to have been made with.

Perhaps, she almost laughs at the thought, I can be the Virgin Mary. Did she not have an older sister Anne who was graced with pregnancy long after she thought her time had passed and the child had been John the Baptist. Perhaps she could say it was a Miracle. That God sent an Angel down and now she is laughing and kind of sobbing because no one would believe her because everyone knows her to be an adulterers even if they do not say as much. She is certain they know for several of her ladies in waiting had left on thin pretexts and the way men look at her is different than before.

She is kneeling, there is snot from nose to chin, one hand is lifted up, clutching the edge the cradle. She wants to vomit. She had thought everything would end smoothly. Would just – fade, perhaps – the way the end of a sonnet fades or a play.

‘Your majesty.’

She hears a man’s voice. It is not Aramis nor is it Mazaran. She thinks, I miss being surrounded by women. Now it is just men. Men everywhere. I wish I had done things differently.

‘Go.’ She does not look over. She holds out her hand to stop whoever it is from coming closer. The thought of being touched revolts her.

There is no movement.

‘There is no shame in it, your majesty.’

The voice is familiar. She holds her stomach. She wishes it were a ghost in her belly.

‘Your majesty.’

She looks over and there is no one but oh – there is someone in a corner. In the shadows and is, himself, a shadow within them. She thinks, Oh it is Treville. His expression is one of pity. She hates it. The room is cold and there is a feeling of greyness and if she feels a hint of the colour blue it is not strong.

‘You’re dead,’ she says. She has not risen to her feet.

‘I am.’

‘I think we can skip formality then, since you are dead and I am alive.’

‘I’d rather not, your majesty.’ He half-bows.

The situation strikes her as funny. She wants to laugh but then thinks that perhaps it is uncouth.

‘I’m your queen.’

He gives her a patient look. She relents. She always liked Treville and why should it change in death? He knows her faults, surely. She has nothing to hide.

‘May I ask what you thought you were doing?’ He asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘When you embarked on this path. It is a conversation I have had often. What must have been the thought process for you to end up thus.’

‘I love him.’ She holds this truth up like a shield. It shatters in hand. ‘I loved him.’

‘You are neither the first nor the only.’

‘I do not expect him to have come to me without a past.’

‘Good. Do you expect him to not have a present and a future as well?’

She trembles. ‘I know he is not loyal to me.’

The expression is kind. He is killing her with it. She is fine with it, though. What a way to die – to be slain with a fatherly expression of patience.

‘Your actions are not those of a queen, your majesty. I had hoped for better from you.’

‘I did what I thought was best.’

‘So you made a man who had no experience your first minister? A man with whom you had already committed treason.’

‘My emotions are not treason.’

‘You are smarter than this, your majesty. Treason and validity are not the same thing. Your feelings are naturally valid. All of our feelings are valid. Your actions as a result of your feelings, however, are not.’

‘You cannot judge me.’

If he flickers here she cannot fathom as to why. It is like an image in too bright a sun where you shield your eyes but it is gone then back then gone. But he remains. She stands because her knees hurt and the floor is cold. Little Louis is asleep. She stares at him. He will look like his father and this terrifies her.

‘I am not judging you, merely inquiring after your thought process. It is for a conversation.’

‘You are not alone, where you are?’

He shrugs. As if to say, It is neither here nor there. She wonders if it is grey where he is or perhaps purgatory is very red and orange like hell or maybe it is white like heaven.

‘I do not fear death,’ she continues. ‘Only what is right before it and what comes after it.’

‘Then you are a wiser woman than most.’

‘I thought together we would be able to weather the storm.’

‘And?’

‘It is like being on a boat in the midst of a tempest and there are walls of water so high that you can see the fish and creatures of the deep swimming by you and your ship is small and the sails are broken.’

‘What are you going to do then, to fix it?’

Her head is shaking, her hands are white. She doesn’t know and she misses the way Aramis used to look at her but does not anymore and she had never learned out to lead a council before and everyone assumes that as regent she would just know. As if by magic she would hold all the answers.

‘Sometimes,’ she whispers. ‘I envy Marie de’Medici.’

‘Do not.’

‘No, captain, I envy her strength. Her will power. Her spine that was so unbreakable. Even when Concini died she remained strong. I saw her fighting even when she cried at his death she was still like iron. Like steel. Like a sword that cannot be broken. The Medici are made of stern materials, hard materials. If she were to be dissected, heaven help us, the world would find that she was made of better things that most mortals.’

Treville looks at her then and it is a calm look. An appraising look. She wants to shy away from it, to wrap herself in Louis’ blanket and hover on the floor. Also, she wants to vomit.

‘You are not without strength of will, your majesty.’

‘I feel like I am.’

‘But you know that it is not true.’

‘I do.’

‘Then that is a start already.’

‘Tell me what I should do.’

The room is so quiet and there is that thin winter sunlight coming in through the windows which have hoarfrost upon them and Treville is still in shadows but he looks warm and kind even though he is a shade and she wishes she, too, were a shade. But she cannot run. She cannot escape to the countryside. She cannot unwind herself from her duties to her son, her people.

‘I cannot tell you what to do. Even if I could I would not. This is your decision.’

‘I wept last night like the world was ending.’

‘There is no shame in that.’

‘I was weak.’

‘You can weep and still be strong. You said it yourself about Marie.’

‘She was a force of nature.’

‘You can be one as well, your majesty.’

‘I don’t want to be one. I want my son to be one.’

His head tilts and then he nods and she can feel that he is fading, pulling away and disappearing himself back to where he came from. The room is shades of gold and brown. She looks at her son bathed in sunlight. She wishes for steel and iron and the dark materials of the earth. She wishes she were not a pillar of salt. She wishes she did not feel like a ghost.


	3. Chapter 3

When they go to bed there is a pulling away. Aramis will reach because he has always done so and Anne will roll away and there will be space there, between them, and she will think that perhaps it has always been there, between them and only now is she seeing it.

She does not have the heart to tell him that sometimes, when he is on top of her, she panics silently in her head and believes him to be Rochefort and he succeeded in having her. Those nights she does not want to be touched but has not the ability to tell Aramis no and had wanted him to be happy, anyway, because if he wasn’t happy he would leave her or maybe worse.

Then there are nights when it is fine and he does not remind her of Rochefort and what they do together does not remind her of assault and she can bear it well and even enjoys it. She marvels that it is only Rochefort who creeps up in such a way since there had been plenty of nights with Louis which had not been willing on her part although no one would know because she would just agree to whatever it is he wanted and she had to appear willing because there had been, at that time, no heir.

But Louis never frightened her. Rochefort had. She is glad he is dead and only wishes she had been the one to run him through.

But this night there is a pulling away because she cannot make Aramis happy because it is too exhausting to make him happy. He leaves, at some point. She lies awake and worries about France.

‘Do you blame me?’ She asks to the empty room. There is no answer.

 

 

Aramis prowls the halls and feels restless and worries about his future. ‘Do you blame me?’ He asks to the empty office. There is no answer.

In the morning they reconcile. Anne is sweet. Aramis is charming. The day passes.

 

 

How do you navigate a world of ghosts. How do you shift through the dead and haunted and the lingering wishes and hopes that had once had potential but now no longer do. How do you go to council and preside over a war effort when you know that the ghosts of the dead cleave themselves to your soul which is a loadstone and you cannot escape it.

D’Artagnan says to Aramis, ‘you’re different. You’ve changed.’ It is said without judgement.

‘Don’t all men change?’

‘Sure, I was merely marking it.’

They do not speak the way they used to. Their languages have diverged and now Aramis finds himself endlessly translating what D’Artagnan and Porthos and Athos say because they are not saying what the words mean when they express them. He misses Porthos the most. He does not know how to reach out, anymore. Hasn’t known how to reach out for years.

So now he works and navigates Anne and Louis and Mazarin and the council and at night he wanders halls looking for a dead cardinal.

 

 

Anne is ill and cannot be seen, will not be seen by anyone but her lady Danielle Mantio who tends to her with kindness. Aramis asks, pulling Danielle in close to him, ‘she is well?’

And Danielle says, pushing away, ‘she is fine.’

He wants to explain to someone that he does care but he cannot think how it was they spoke before because there is so little between them, now. He traces their relationship back to the beginning and is guilty when he sees how little between them there had always been. If Anne feels it too, she does not say.

 

 

‘France will not unify behind the queen.’

There is the shade and he is in the office now and Aramis is surprised, only, that he had not seen him here before. That he had first appeared in the hallway.

‘How can they not love her?’

A sardonic look.

‘She cares for the people,’ he insists because he must and it is true. ‘Surely France can see that?’

‘No.’

Sitting at the desk Aramis feels wrong. The way Richelieu stares unsettles him and he knows he should not be at this desk that it should be someone else and he had tried to tell people that but, and now that it is further along and time has passed, he knows he had not tried very hard.

‘There’s going to be a civil war.’

Richelieu nods.

‘It’s going to be horrific.’

Another nod.

‘I cannot stop it.’

A smile. Cruel, small, vicious. A snake in the garden of Eden.

‘You could.’

He feels that rage again. The rage he felt when he saw Adele’s grave. When he knew of the cardinal’s plot against Anne. But as quickly as it rises it subsides. He thinks about Adele and wonders if the cardinal had loved her. Probably not. If the cardinal were to love a woman it would be someone different from Adele.

‘How did you manage this?’

‘Your lack of clarity in asking questions continues to astound.’

‘The work, the country, the court. You had it all working so well and effortlessly.’

‘No.’

Aramis hates that reply. The candle on his desk flickers and he rummages for another to light and replace it. The wax pools over the holder and sticks to the wood and leaves his fingers feeling oily and uncertain.

‘Could you expand?’

‘It was balanced but at any time it could fall. Did fall, on several occasions. Then you build it back up again. It is like a house of cards. Nothing is unfixable, most situations are salvageable if you catch them early enough. The _seigneurs_ of France do not like being run over roughshod by a Spanish queen, whom they have labeled, delightfully, a whore, and her upstart, non-noble First Minister.’

He cannot respond to that without bluster and has felt those days of reacting without thinking slipping away from him. He is capable of learning, he knows. It sometimes takes a while, yet.

‘How is the queen?’

‘Fine. She’s fine.’

‘I suppose congratulations are to be offered. Although I do not think the situation worthy of such expressions.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A second child. How are you going to pull this one off, I wonder.’

Aramis blinks. Richelieu’s snake-smile returns.

‘Oh, you had not heard? Too busy with your latest paramour, what is her name, Danielle? The lady in waiting. Tell me, Aramis, are you going to upturn the entirety of France for her as well?’

He shakes his head and denies everything even though, he madly thinks, this is a ghost and not the real man but he is still frightened of Richelieu in the way that he always had been because in front of the cardinal he is just a small boy who knows nothing and it angers him that the man, even in death, knows him better than he knows himself.

‘Or are you going to run?’

The questions sits heavily in the room.

‘I hear from you advocate that you are very good at that. It’s another point conceded to me.’

‘Who’s my advocate?’

The look is a pitying one. ‘You cannot guess?’

He cannot.

Richelieu is gone and the room regains some semblance of warmth. Aramis takes himself to Adele’s grave and sits with the dead.

When Anne finds him in the morning she sits beside him and he says, ‘you’re pregnant.’ And she says, ‘I was.’ And he says, ‘I’m sorry.’ And she says, ‘it’s all right.’


	4. Chapter 4

‘How do you build a relationship?’ Anne asks. She is curled by the fire and there are state papers at her feet and Mazarin is leaning against the wall. He is resplendent in red then way Richelieu had worn black. She finds it odd, having a cardinal around when for so long it had been the immovable rock of Armand.

‘With the people, your majesty? You must be seen by them. Visit their towns and cities. Do a tour with your son and show him to them so they may see their king. You must give them cause to love you.’

There are open accounts. The numbers slip and slide and cannot be made to work. They are hemorrhaging money. She feels impotent in the face of the task of putting order to France. Mazarin calmly suggests that perhaps he can take a look at the figures and the revenue intake and see if something cannot be done about it.

She sags with relief, ‘would you please? I do not have a head for this and nor does Aramis.’

Mazarin is a portrait of a perfect courtier. He bows, gathers up the papers, and bids her majesty a good night.

‘Usually on open communication and trust.’

Anne blinks. There, where Mazarin had been, is the cardinal. The old cardinal. She curls into herself when she sees him.

‘But I’m not sure either you or Aramis are up for the task.’

‘Be nice.’

There is the captain of the musketeers and she is thankful he is there. But she cannot take her eyes off Richelieu. He frightens her. How is it, she wonders, a single man can wield such force? But Treville does not seem afraid of him. But Treville, she thinks, has never been afraid of anything.

‘They don’t deserve that. Though I’m pleased to see that you’re bringing Jules-Raymond on board, it is the only rational decision made in your time as regent.’

Anne sits straight and glares at him. He is just a ghost. He is merely an echo of a once living man and so cannot hurt her. There are rules ghosts must abide and surely it means he is here on unfinished business. Treville is standing beside the cardinal and is as in the dark as the cardinal. They are phantoms mocking the life that is around her. They are reminders of her past.

‘The cardinal has been kind.’

Treville smiles at Richelieu, ‘that is the first time I’ve heard such a sentence.’ Richelieu scoffs. Rolls his eyes.

‘It is not the role of the First Minister to be kind. It is his job to do what no one else will do or wants to do – you know this well enough, captain.’

A mock bow. She marvels that they are so amiable with one another. Had they not always hated each other?

‘What is it that you want?’

They neither reply. She repeats herself. They repeat themselves. She finally asks, ‘is this hell?’ And Richelieu laughs and it is cold stone and water with ice breaking off at the end of winter.

‘Not for you.’

She makes a face. Richelieu shrugs.

‘You were born to the purple, your majesty. Just as I was born to nobility. We have all been given rolls to play and none of this should be a shock to you yet you continue to pretend that there are no repercussions for your actions.’

‘I was not alone in this!’

‘No. But you will be at the end of it.’

‘Why are you haunting me?’

‘Oh,’ a smile. ‘Do not heave too much pity upon yourself. Your precious Aramis has conversations with us as well. He is just as useless as I remember him being in life.’

Treville touches his arm. She sees them flicker, fade, leaning into each other and the wisps of shadows wrapping them up and taking them away.

 

 

What is there to want? Treville walks through halls that had once echoed with his footsteps and watches young men whose names he will never know, and faces he will never be familiar with, come to the garrison and there is Athos looking older than his years and D’Artagnan still boyish but behind it there is age.

There is very little to want once the wanting of life is over which happens quick enough. So is not sure how to answer such a question and when the queen posed it and posed it and wanted so desperately to know that they had a point and purpose there was only silence as response because what else is there to say?

He is not a nihilist nor a fatalist and thinks there are better philosophies in the minds of man than those. It is in the Notre Dame that he finds Richelieu who is standing by the altar and the smoke of incence lingers in the air. Shards of sunlight cut through it. Treville wants a portrait painted of this sight but then wonders what he would do with such a thing, being that he is a spirit now.

‘You have come to reprimand me for being harsh.’ Richelieu says when he notices Treville.

‘No.’

‘Ah,’ a grim smile. ‘My turn to hear monosyllabic answers. Very well. I am do not fear them.’

‘I’m not playing your game.’

‘No.’

Treville grins at him and Richelieu wonders how it came to be that they only learned to understand one another truly, fully, implicitly, in death. If there is an irony to that he does not wish to ruin the mood by exploring it. His captain is in a good humour and they are now by the Seine and there is snow underfoot and puffs of breath can be seen from those who are living.

‘Autumn or spring?’ Richelieu asks.

‘Spring.’

‘Hm, me as well.’

‘Ovid or Tacitus?’

‘Captain those are hardly related.’

‘Pick one.’

‘Ovid.’

‘Fine. Tacitus.’

‘I am hardly shocked.’

They are walking, drifting, scooting along the bank then over the bridge to the Marais and its denizens go through them and Richelieu wonders, always he is wondering, how it has come to this. The sun is very nice, despite its glinting off ice and snow.

He asks, ‘Anne Boleyn or Katherine Parr?’

Treville blinks. What an odd question. ‘Boleyn. She was more interesting. Monday or Wednesday?’

‘Wednesday. Monday was when I took confessions.’

‘Are you allowed to speak of them now that you are dead?’

‘It is a consideration theologians put little work into so I cannot say. I rather think not. I took the role of confessor seriously.’

Treville thinks this admirable and tells the cardinal who scoffs at him. Oh no, no, it comes with the job. And you took your job seriously which is not admirable captain, merely expected.

‘You’re not good at receiving earnest compliments, are you?’

Richelieu waves that off. They are in the Louvre again. They always end up in the Louvre. Their memories are etched into the smooth stone and their souls carved into the marble.

‘Do you think Mazarin a good replacement for you?’

‘He will be acceptable.’

From the Louvre to the Palais Cardinal which is now become the Palais Royale and Richelieu’s expression is musing, gentle. Treville wants to trace it with his fingers and gives in to the temptation because you cannot burn a ghost. What would the world do, should they find out? Disinter their bodies and drag them through the streets? It is not unheard of. But what is that to them? They are already dead. Richelieu kisses his fingers.

‘You know what I miss most?’ He asks, taking Treville’s hand in his own. ‘Sleeping. I never thought I’d miss that but I could do with a nap right now.’

A cat wanders by with a brief, unconcerned glance towards them. Richelieu beams at it.

‘That’s Thisbe,’ he says.

Treville rolls his eyes, there is an affectionate smile, they fade into the building.

 

 

Aramis wakes. It is late. Early. The moon is full and the winter months lingering and he has been cold for so, so long. The room is all greys and deep colours of the night and he wonders if he is alone aside from the memories.

Which is why he woke.

Because there was Lavell again, dying whilst coughing up blood onto his face and it had been warm. The blood. And Lavell as they fell over together because of the impact of the shrapnel into Lavell’s back which had caused the coughing of the blood to begin with and how do you sleep with dreams of that nature? He doesn’t, generally, and develops a keen appreciation for Athos’ liquor soaked liver.

Anne is not with him tonight.

He wanders the halls. He fancies himself a ghost. There is Mazarin up late, working long after everyone else has gone to bed. The cardinal greats him with a bow.

‘Everything is in order for the rolling out of the new taxes, monsieur.’

‘Thank you. You should get some rest.’

Mazarin says he will and there is amusement in his expression. We can do no good for France if we are not thinking clearly, he says from the end of the hallway. Aramis turns to reply but the cardinal is gone.

In the office Aramis can feel the memories layering themselves, mapping onto to one another so there is Louis as king waiting for his sister and Porthos joking about feinting for something to do. There is Treville dying. There is Porthos screaming at him, The queen killed our captain she as good as killed our captain you and her as good as killed our captain. And Athos watching and not saying anything and D’Artagnan and Constance turning away so they do not have to witness Porthos’ grief and anger. There is his seminary and the other young men and they are joking about summoning a demon to help them with their pre-Trent theology, particularly William of Ockham who gives them trouble and perhaps Bernard of Clarivaux, if the demon could be troubled. If Christ did it, why not they? Then there is his mother and her face held away from him and his father is not around because he is busy that night and could not afford to be around. Then Anne, the day they met but also Adele and Danielle and all the other women he has ever met and even Marie de’Medici is a memory with her hawkish face and stern demeanor. Marie maps onto Anne. Sometimes generations repeat themselves in new formations and ways unexpected.

He wants to run. He wants to flee. He cannot be here anymore and everything about the Louvre makes his skin itch and his son will be fine, won’t he? He’ll have Anne and Mazarin to raise him to be a good king. A just king. A king upon whom the sun will always shine.

The way to Anne’s rooms is deserted. The queen had spoken of feeling alone before, back when Louis was alive, but now it is so manifest, and so true that it hurts. She is awake when he lets himself in but does not rise to greet him.

‘I’ve come to say goodnight,’ he says. She nods. Neither point out how late the hour is. The direction from which Mazarin had been coming in the halls. That her hair is down and not braided.

She always braided her hair before bed.

He stands in the middle of the room. She sits in the bed. They have nothing to say to each other. They have become ghosts of their past selves.

‘This can’t work,’ Anne says.

‘We thought it might.’

‘We were dreaming Aramis. And it was a beautiful dream.’

‘We can still dream it.’

She looks at him and he is crying and so is she but there is so little to say that it is a lot and so much to say that it is a little.

‘I am a queen, Aramis. Although I think I am only now coming to realize it. Like waking. Or coming up for air once the waves have receeded.’

‘Is this about the child you lost-‘

‘No.’

He nods. He thinks it still must be because what else could she be talking about?

‘Was it mine?’

She nods. She wonders why he is still talking about this  because there is so much more to say.

‘I’ll go to bed then,’ he says.

‘Good night, Aramis.’

When she sleeps she dreams of a baby in her womb pressing its head down against her pelvic but then it is a ghost of the potential of a child pressing against her pelvic, kicking into her spine, splitting her open and her innards are autumnal colours. She had become autumn. An Autumnal queen is better than no queen at all.

 

 

Richelieu stands in his office and there is Mazarin at his desk and he says to Treville that this is better. This is how it should be. There has been a correction of something. As if events had slipped off their intended track and have now been restored to their proper order. More or less. For better or worse.

Mazarin looks up and towards them and through them.

He does not see them.

Treville asks, ‘sunrise or sunset.’

And Richelieu says, ‘sunrise. I am always awake for them.’

And Treville takes his hand and says, ‘I don’t think they were thinking.’

‘So you’ve come around to my argument.’

‘After having done rigourous research and consulted several key people, I have indeed “come around” as you say.’

Richelieu smiles and says they should go for a stroll. The Seine is beautiful in the winter and if we’re lucky, and hope and luck is on our side, we might get to see the Regent’s Council getting pelted with snowballs.

They fade into the building, through it, alongside it. And there is sun filtering in through the windows and what do you do with ghosts? With hauntings? You rub alongside them and with them and against them.

Treville says, ‘I still stand by Aramis as a musketeer.’

‘Fine,’ Richelieu snaps. ‘He was good at waving a sword about but not much else.’

‘That’ll do.’

‘Can I get a good word from you about the Red Guards?’

‘Over my dead body.’

Richelieu makes a face. That was uncalled for. Treville says he is unrepentant. That they’ll be here a while yet and so Richelieu had better get used to it. The cardinal replies that it would be a pleasure.

The grey shifts and gathers and they slip through the folds of it and beside the Notre Dame, along the banks of the Seine there is a disappearance. An ending. A sigh of falling clothes and no-longer-present feet against snow and the sun is very bright and the day cold and clear and shadows thin along the ground.


End file.
